“Beethoven in Black and Blue: The Archive of Ellison’s Musical Imagination”

• In Event: Archives of Blackness

Abstract

“Beethoven in Black and Blue” explores Ralph Ellison’s expansive musical imagination in relation to his drafting and editing process. I organize my inquiry around Ellison’s diverse musical interests, rather than the prevailing notions of black music that structure many studies of Ellison and African American literature more generally. Therefore, I consider European orchestral music alongside the blues in Invisible Man because Ellison did so himself, both in the published manuscript and his unpublished drafting. My archival research documents the invisible labor that precedes audience encounters with music and text: the composition, annotation, revision, and improvisation of the creative process in action. This project makes extensive use of the Ralph Ellison Papers at the Library of Congress, as well as collections housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Louis Armstrong House Museum Archives, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Ellison consistently refused to draw impermeable lines between the classical music that he studied and the vernacular music he loved, both of which remained central to the humanist project that he pursued throughout his life. By examining the editing of episodes involving Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, trumpet performance technique, and Armstrong’s 1929 recording of “(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue,” I show how Ellison honed his representations of music to critique racial codes of belonging while maintaining reverence for both European and African American musical traditions. In addition, I read Ellison’s Beethoven alongside a stubbornly persistent cultural speculation that Beethoven was of African descent, which regained traction in the mid-twentieth century in the writing of Jamaican-American historian Joel Augustus Rogers. It is less important, I argue, to know whether Ellison knew or believed this theory than it is to trace the textual connections between Invisible Man’s carefully coiffed published prose and mid-century discourse about race and musical repertoire and history. These broader cultural connections indicate a constellation of blackness, invisibility, and Beethoven that both raises the specter of Africa within canonical Western music history and offer an alternative to the increasingly stark divisions between black and classical music.

Furthermore, I trace the history of the song “Black and Blue” from its origins as a woman’s stage performance—written by two men—to the novel’s master trope. This journey, which foregrounds the occlusion of black women’s musical labor, resonates throughout the novel as a ghost haunting Invisible Man’s quest for a socially legible and individually sustaining identity. The ghosts of women and their labor, from the drastically reduced presence of Mary Rambo in the published novel to the complete excision of Invisible Man’s love interests Cleo and Louise, populate the archival boxes of Invisible Man drafts. Attending to the resonances between this literary editing and the musical versioning of “Black and Blue,” I show how music encodes a historical specificity in Ellison’s archive, mapping an alternative to the dominant view of black music as a form of cultural resistance.

Author

• Alexander W. Corey, University of Colorado, Boulder (CO)